Hi,
I just bought a Haupauge DEC 2000-t USB DVB-t box (I had only checked
that it is supported by the driver but not seen the "fine print" in
the mailing list, so it looked like a good choice under linux )-;
When trying to get the thing to work, I ran into all kinds of problems
and after some searching found out, that it's obviously not just a
problem with my particular setup, but something more fundamental.
To summarize (it seems like all of this has already been reported
here or in other lists/forums):
- after a small number of channel changes, the box crashes; the syslog
shows the messages "bulk timeout on ep4in" and
"ttusb_dec_send_command: result bulk message failed : error -110";
the only way to recover is by unloading the driver, power cycling
the box and reloading the driver. This is not restricted to any
particular program like "xine" - just switching back and forth
a couple of times between two channels via tzap is enough.
- trying to read any data directly from "/dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0" (via
mplayer, xine, test_dvr or simply "cat") doesn't work - no error,
but no data either.
- In my case, the only way to get anything from the box was to
first "tzap <some channel>", abort the tzap (otherwise mplayer
reports "DVB CONFIGURATION IS EMPTY") and then call "mplayer
dvb://<some channel>"
- Furthermore (but this might be a mplayer issue), some channels (like
"arte" or "VOX" look pretty blurry and have a gurgling sound (on tv
the same channels look alright)
Obviously, there are also some people out there, where this box
actually works (unfortunately, there aren't any detailed success
stories available because there isn't any reason to publish the
absence of problems ;-). The error reports that I found when searching
the net show a wide variety of hardware and software environments, the
problems seem to occur with 2.4.x as well as with 2.6.x kernels, all
kinds of different USB controllers (just for completeness: I have a
Asus P4-PE board with UHCI-USB1.1 and EHCI-USB-2.0 interfaces, whether
I connect the box direcly or via hub doesn't make any difference,
kernel version is 2.6.7, dvb-apps-1.1.0)
As somebody already suspected (and what I could find searching the web
is consistent with this), all the problems seem to occur in Germany
(in my case: Berlin; actually the box also has a type plate claiming
"made in Germany). So I'm wondering: Is there anybody out there who
uses the DEC 2000-t successfully in Germany (and of course under linux;
I also checked that the thing works with the included software)?
I don't know how big national peculiarities in DVB-T are, but it looks
like this plays a certain role here ...
Regards,
Peter